Fordham University Press Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Faith and reason, especially in Roman Catholic thought, are less contradictory today than ever. But does the supposed opposition even make sense to begin with? One can lose faith, but surely not because one gains in reason. Some, in fact, lose faith when reason is not able to make sense of the experiences of our lives. We very quickly realize that reason does not understand everything. Immense areas remain incomprehensible and irrational, which we abandon to belief and opinion.Soon we definitively renounce thinking what that has been excluded from the realm of the thinkable. Ideological nightmares arise from this slumber of reason. Thus, the separation between faith and reason, too quickly taken as self-evident and even natural, is born from a lack of rationality, an easy capitulatin of reason before what is supposedly unthinkable. Rather than lose faith through excessive rationality, we often lose rationality because faith is too quickly excluded from the realm that it claims to open, that of revelation. We lose reason by losing faith.Examining such topics as the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly, this book spans the range of Marion’s thought on Christianity. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, structured according to the logic of the gift that calls forth a response of love and devotion through kenotic abandon. Review Jean-Luc Marion is one of today’s most pre-eminent philosophers of religion. The range of sources engaged, the detail of analytical rigor, and the profundity of insight―all are amply on display in this collection of essays spanning several decades of work. Newcomers to Marion’s oeuvre, and those well acquainted with his work, will find in Believing in Order to See treasures to savor. Author: ―Norman Wirzba Source: Duke Divinity School From the Author Jean-Luc Marion is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris–Sorbonne Paris IV, Dominique Dubarle Professor of Philosophy at the Institut catholique de Paris, Andrew T. Greely and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a member of the Academie française. About the Author Jean-Luc Marion is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris–Sorbonne Paris IV, Dominique Dubarle Professor of Philosophy at the Institut catholique de Paris, Andrew T. Greely and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a member of the Academie française.Christina M. Gschwandtner is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University.